What up scrubs. So I started this post 2 weeks ago and then forgot about it. But yeah, here it is.
Here's a short interjection before I begin - I really like to point out the bad aspects of a culture because it's a lot easier and more interesting to be a critic than just talk about how pretty the mountains are. There's some really shitty things about male/female interactions in the US and western world at large, and I don't want to sound like some kind of socio-centrist but I'm in a different culture right now and that's what I'm commenting on. So bear with me while I attempt to tear apart Arab society, keeping in mind that I'm an Arab myself and proud of it.
One of the things that interests me the most about the the Arab world is women. But even more than that, men. Arab men. And women. But mostly men. Shit.
All that aside, I was really excited to come to Morocco to see how women and men interact with each other here and to ask one sex about the other and vice versa. It's also been a really interesting experience to be in a relationship over here and see people's reaction to that, which overall haven't been out of the ordinary, barring one or two honks from angry old men who apparently don't like seeing a man and a woman holding hands. Especially FRENCH TOURISTS (what we appear to be to everyone). Anyway, since this was one of the subjects I wanted to explore the most I feel like I can dedicate a post or two about it. And because a lot of the things I really really really want to talk about I'm going to have to save for when I get home.
I think my earliest memories of probing at gender relations here was in the classroom. Me and some of my colleagues (yeah, not peers, colleagues) made a pretty big point of asking our female Moroccan teachers about the status of women in Moroccan society, and why the public sphere seems to be monopolized by men sitting silently in coffee shops. Almost as if "how to answer this question" was the focal point of their pre-program orientation they would all answer the same exact way:
"It's because the Moroccan woman is always working. Most of us have careers to pursue during the day and directly after our work day we have to go home and clean the house and feed the family. There's no time for coffee."
This answer would usually be surrounded by talk about how the Maghribi woman (Moroccan/Algerian/Tunisian) has much more opportunity and independence than most of the Arab world, which I think has some validity to it. From what I've seen Moroccan women are very mobile and have an amazing work ethic, whereas Moroccan men (broadly speaking as there are of course many exceptions) are very...immobile. Literally every third building here has a coffee shop on the bottom floor that is filled with men staring and smoking. Then they go home and eat something, and come back to the cafe and stare/smoke some more. I'm not going to comment on this right now, because it's a whole different subject but here is a really fantastic article that will give you some insight into the completely emasculated Maghrebi male:
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=QwQ8fJwqgNoC&oi=fnd&pg=PA109&dq=maghrebi+youth+between+alienation+and+integration&ots=0lwIHL6it5&sig=Lbo8R-fU9bezTRyz8Gc1qJzOYrk#v=onepage&q=maghrebi%20youth%20between%20alienation%20and%20integration&f=false
I should however mention that I've met a lot of people here who work 14 hour days. It's interesting how there doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground.
Yeah I'm trailing off, here's another experience I had towards the first half of the program. Me and my friend, who is a female, were walking to the store to buy some assorted cookies/sub-par potato chips and 2 guys that were leaning real hard on the side of a house decided it would be real cool to look right at me and say something along the lines of "VERY BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, EH?", talking about the girl I was walking with. If I remember correctly I told him "congratulations bro" in Arabic and kept walking. On our way back we passed by them again and started asking us how we knew Arabic and instead of ignoring them and returning back to the hotel to feast on our leader chips we stayed and had a conversation with them. As I told them that cat calling women is a generally frowned upon in the US and that was the reason I had such a displeased reaction to it, they proceeded to argue that they were merely forwarding a compliment. Here's the exact words they said; "It's like if I said this is a very beautiful tree, or street!" Come on maaaaan. Way to compare a woman to a tree. At least it would be a cool tree I guess.
From that experience I found that the young men here actually think that they are doing women a service by being greasy assholes, so it's hard to blame them. I actually saw one of those guys multiple times after that encounter and hung out with him, including a very strange experience with his drugged out uncle. Also there's the idea that foreign women are especially willing to spread em, and the intense sexual repression that they are forced to endure definitely doesn't help. And it's not only with the men. One time, when I was hanging out and walking around with the guy who sexually harassed my friend (haha), somehow the subject of my girlfriend came up. He said "oh so that girl that you were with the other day is your girlfriend, right?" And when I explained that she wasn't he could not comprehend how I could walk with another girl without my girlfriend going absolutely iNsAnE with jealousy. He said any Moroccan girl would NOT be okay with that. Sounds like a lack of emotional maturity and a whole lot of insecurity to me? Those are emotions that shouldn't plague a 25 year old college educated woman or man to that degree.
And other day my friend was telling me a story from his home-stay in which he tried to help his host mom clean up after dinner and his host dad forbade him saying "in Morocco, women do all the work in the house and the men relax because we bring home the (kosher) bacon" (extreme paraphrasing). And that's definitely not the first time I've heard a story about that... Unforgivable.
Earlier I talked a little bit about the coffee shop culture, and I want to close this post talking about the public sphere overall. Although I said you rarely see a Moroccan woman just chillin in a cafe or restaurant, walking around the city and the markets, woman are present and definitely a part of every day public interaction. But there's still a wall of separation between the sexes that manifests itself most noticeably through the hijaab (head scarf). Not every woman is covered, actually it might be as much as 50/50 from what I can see, but it's still a very widespread religious practice and a lot of women make the choice to cover themselves. Which is cool you know, I'm down with it if you make that personal decision...I just think it's unwise and you're disrespecting yourself and your sex if you do. In Arabic there's an expression that I've seen and heard many times in different contexts:
المرأة عورة
Don't try to google translate it because it'll probably come out "Woman is genitals" or something like that. But in so many words it basically means "The woman is a thing to be ashamed of and covered". At least that's how it was explained to me and I take it to mean, especially because of the contexts I've read it in. This saying isn't Quranically supported and is an archaic way of thinking that unfortunately holds a lot of ground today in Arab culture, and it's most obviously seen in hijaab culture.
The Arab world has a long way to go when it comes to relationships between the men and women, as it's apparent that women are still considered the inferior sex in most spheres of life and treated as so. But I think especially in North Africa it's getting better. The current generation seems to have a strong focus on education and hopefully that will help, depending on the kind of education they get...Next topic? Sorry this post was just a bunch of random experiences and ramblings, I still have no idea what I'm doing.
Here's a short interjection before I begin - I really like to point out the bad aspects of a culture because it's a lot easier and more interesting to be a critic than just talk about how pretty the mountains are. There's some really shitty things about male/female interactions in the US and western world at large, and I don't want to sound like some kind of socio-centrist but I'm in a different culture right now and that's what I'm commenting on. So bear with me while I attempt to tear apart Arab society, keeping in mind that I'm an Arab myself and proud of it.
One of the things that interests me the most about the the Arab world is women. But even more than that, men. Arab men. And women. But mostly men. Shit.
All that aside, I was really excited to come to Morocco to see how women and men interact with each other here and to ask one sex about the other and vice versa. It's also been a really interesting experience to be in a relationship over here and see people's reaction to that, which overall haven't been out of the ordinary, barring one or two honks from angry old men who apparently don't like seeing a man and a woman holding hands. Especially FRENCH TOURISTS (what we appear to be to everyone). Anyway, since this was one of the subjects I wanted to explore the most I feel like I can dedicate a post or two about it. And because a lot of the things I really really really want to talk about I'm going to have to save for when I get home.
I think my earliest memories of probing at gender relations here was in the classroom. Me and some of my colleagues (yeah, not peers, colleagues) made a pretty big point of asking our female Moroccan teachers about the status of women in Moroccan society, and why the public sphere seems to be monopolized by men sitting silently in coffee shops. Almost as if "how to answer this question" was the focal point of their pre-program orientation they would all answer the same exact way:
"It's because the Moroccan woman is always working. Most of us have careers to pursue during the day and directly after our work day we have to go home and clean the house and feed the family. There's no time for coffee."
This answer would usually be surrounded by talk about how the Maghribi woman (Moroccan/Algerian/Tunisian) has much more opportunity and independence than most of the Arab world, which I think has some validity to it. From what I've seen Moroccan women are very mobile and have an amazing work ethic, whereas Moroccan men (broadly speaking as there are of course many exceptions) are very...immobile. Literally every third building here has a coffee shop on the bottom floor that is filled with men staring and smoking. Then they go home and eat something, and come back to the cafe and stare/smoke some more. I'm not going to comment on this right now, because it's a whole different subject but here is a really fantastic article that will give you some insight into the completely emasculated Maghrebi male:
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=QwQ8fJwqgNoC&oi=fnd&pg=PA109&dq=maghrebi+youth+between+alienation+and+integration&ots=0lwIHL6it5&sig=Lbo8R-fU9bezTRyz8Gc1qJzOYrk#v=onepage&q=maghrebi%20youth%20between%20alienation%20and%20integration&f=false
I should however mention that I've met a lot of people here who work 14 hour days. It's interesting how there doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground.
Yeah I'm trailing off, here's another experience I had towards the first half of the program. Me and my friend, who is a female, were walking to the store to buy some assorted cookies/sub-par potato chips and 2 guys that were leaning real hard on the side of a house decided it would be real cool to look right at me and say something along the lines of "VERY BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, EH?", talking about the girl I was walking with. If I remember correctly I told him "congratulations bro" in Arabic and kept walking. On our way back we passed by them again and started asking us how we knew Arabic and instead of ignoring them and returning back to the hotel to feast on our leader chips we stayed and had a conversation with them. As I told them that cat calling women is a generally frowned upon in the US and that was the reason I had such a displeased reaction to it, they proceeded to argue that they were merely forwarding a compliment. Here's the exact words they said; "It's like if I said this is a very beautiful tree, or street!" Come on maaaaan. Way to compare a woman to a tree. At least it would be a cool tree I guess.
From that experience I found that the young men here actually think that they are doing women a service by being greasy assholes, so it's hard to blame them. I actually saw one of those guys multiple times after that encounter and hung out with him, including a very strange experience with his drugged out uncle. Also there's the idea that foreign women are especially willing to spread em, and the intense sexual repression that they are forced to endure definitely doesn't help. And it's not only with the men. One time, when I was hanging out and walking around with the guy who sexually harassed my friend (haha), somehow the subject of my girlfriend came up. He said "oh so that girl that you were with the other day is your girlfriend, right?" And when I explained that she wasn't he could not comprehend how I could walk with another girl without my girlfriend going absolutely iNsAnE with jealousy. He said any Moroccan girl would NOT be okay with that. Sounds like a lack of emotional maturity and a whole lot of insecurity to me? Those are emotions that shouldn't plague a 25 year old college educated woman or man to that degree.
And other day my friend was telling me a story from his home-stay in which he tried to help his host mom clean up after dinner and his host dad forbade him saying "in Morocco, women do all the work in the house and the men relax because we bring home the (kosher) bacon" (extreme paraphrasing). And that's definitely not the first time I've heard a story about that... Unforgivable.
Earlier I talked a little bit about the coffee shop culture, and I want to close this post talking about the public sphere overall. Although I said you rarely see a Moroccan woman just chillin in a cafe or restaurant, walking around the city and the markets, woman are present and definitely a part of every day public interaction. But there's still a wall of separation between the sexes that manifests itself most noticeably through the hijaab (head scarf). Not every woman is covered, actually it might be as much as 50/50 from what I can see, but it's still a very widespread religious practice and a lot of women make the choice to cover themselves. Which is cool you know, I'm down with it if you make that personal decision...I just think it's unwise and you're disrespecting yourself and your sex if you do. In Arabic there's an expression that I've seen and heard many times in different contexts:
المرأة عورة
Don't try to google translate it because it'll probably come out "Woman is genitals" or something like that. But in so many words it basically means "The woman is a thing to be ashamed of and covered". At least that's how it was explained to me and I take it to mean, especially because of the contexts I've read it in. This saying isn't Quranically supported and is an archaic way of thinking that unfortunately holds a lot of ground today in Arab culture, and it's most obviously seen in hijaab culture.
The Arab world has a long way to go when it comes to relationships between the men and women, as it's apparent that women are still considered the inferior sex in most spheres of life and treated as so. But I think especially in North Africa it's getting better. The current generation seems to have a strong focus on education and hopefully that will help, depending on the kind of education they get...Next topic? Sorry this post was just a bunch of random experiences and ramblings, I still have no idea what I'm doing.
Wait.. what?! You were walking with another girl without telling me!?!? SO JEALOUS. - thegf
ReplyDeleteDoes it need to be clarified that I'm kidding?
you make some good points in your ramblings
Which is cool you know, I'm down with it if you make that personal decision...I just think it's unwise and you're disrespecting yourself and your sex if you do.
ReplyDelete----------------
The reason women were the Hijab in Muslim culture because its a sign of modesty,self-respect, and strong character. This in NO WAY is unwise and disrespecting to the female sex.
So I've always been really fast to defend the hijab saying that people just need to stop caring about what women wear, it's a personal choice and whether that choice is to walk around naked or cover from head to foot, it's no one's decision but the woman's. Which I still hold to be true, and having spent some time in Morocco it really did surprise me to what extent veiling appears to be a woman's personal choice. In my host family, some women veil, some don't, some do only with complete strangers.. my host mom stopped veiling when Tarek comes to visit. High school girls walk around in shorter skirts than I've ever worn. However, somehow my summer experiences make me lean more than ever towards what the angry siblings are saying - veiling, the need to veil, societal pressure to veil ESPECIALLY when those pressures try to promote modesty, self-respect, and strong character, disrespect a woman and visibly block her from participating to the same extent as other individuals in the public sphere. Now, this is not to say that what's happening in France/Western Europe isn't complete racist bullshit. However, veiling to build strong character implies that a woman who doesn't is immodest, without self-respect, and has a weak character. Somehow, I think this is why I've had multiple offers for prostitution when Tarek doesn't walk home with me at night.
ReplyDeleteSo I stick to the fact that it's a woman's choice what to where.. but societies everywhere need to stop treating woman like bodies and start treating them like contributing members with differing wills and needs, and stop grouping them under one definition. And, actually, veiling is probably the least pressing issue because, like Amina said, it's basically a thing of habit rather than oppression currently. Fi kul anha al3alam (freaking all over the world), societies treat woman like bodies - there are many problems with the way women are objectified in the West - frat boys getting girls drunk, pressures to be sexually liberated etcetcetc.
So point being, the older I get the more feminist I get and I'm not about to make excuses for "eastern" societies to stop myself from sounding like a French racist when I'm so eager to accuse my own culture of sexism.
Tried many times to avoid arguing in such subjects but sometimes it is important to clarify the blurriness of some foreigner prejudice about Islam & the Arab world. I guess you agree with me that studying societies like 'the Arabs' or let us enlarge the picture a little to Muslims isn’t or shouldn’t be based on a summary of notes on an occasional traveling experience. People in your modern world may dedicate their lives sometimes to just explain scientifically the most simple & clear human behavior like a hand gesture. Now, are you willing to consider not reading about what is the roots of an Arabic society and the impact of Islam as a way of life & not just a religion or a stupid ritual as always declared by whom I believe they can’t even access to the Arabic language, therefore, how can they understand the Curran or Sounna or even their simplest explanations. I won’t cite chapters or speeches of our prophet Mohamed, this is because, I usually sense that “do not tell me what Mohamed says and try to convince me other ways”. OK, I am on it, but on the reverse side, you should not take any prejudice on a society that is based on your cultural background.
ReplyDelete“المرأة عورة” what an expression you got there. If you asked me, I won’t deny the expression but I would add to it what was missing. Namely what is عورة in المرأة. You were taken by the phrase superficially not knowing that it has a Islamic roots while It means what are the parts of the woman body that needs to appear. Up to the moment, I guess you will start wondering why? OK, I agree, let us take the freedom of making this statement as stupid as it sounds and say that it is a nonsense in term of woman rights. Do you accept to have your family walking naked in streets. Let us say you accepted it ever since that it is happening in some parts of Europe like Spain. You know, there is an old Arabic saying “ان لم تستحي ففعل ما شئت” which means, if you don’t feel ashamed of anything, do whatever you want. It was proven in history that the moral decadence in any society is considered a great risk in destroying its civilization. I am not negating your remarks in Morocco, but those notes shouldn’t they be verified in a Magribian historiography context. Do you know that a least a hundred year of destructive french colonialism, the Maghreb society(Algeria,Morocco,Tunisia...) was still in recovery of a continual war on Islam including telling those stories of Islam against woman, or woman shouldn’t work. Do you know that what you have met and hang over with like most of youth in the Maghreb are ignoring their Islamic roots or culture and this is because of effect of some political plans of France. Woman in Arab Countries when the Islam had its civilization was working, taking hidjab as a she believed in it to bring moral respect, teaching & participating in political leadership as عائشة أم المؤمنين did ( the wife of our prophet ). Now, I think you better read first Tarek & then claim a valid statement.
Hey Nadjib, thanks for reading and commenting. I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to be some prejudiced foreigner that went on a study abroad and thinks he's figured everything out. Keep in mind that these are my observations and my personal reactions to them. At the same time, I have had a decent amount of education on Arab society not only through growing up us a Muslim, but also in my education and my own personal interests. So I think I have enough experience to at least comment on it without being labeled an ignorant tourist who doesn't have any right to forward an opinion.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, although I agree with you on the many negative effects of European colonization, I don't think it's right to completely blame all problems on the west. Islam sees sex/sexual attraction as a potential cause for societal decline or destruction, which I'm not arguing against (right now, anyway). However the way that Islamic society, which includes but isn't limited to Arab society, attempts to deal with this problem is by lowering the sexual attractiveness of women. This is done not JUST by covering of the body with the hijaab or the niqaab etc. but is also exercised through active separation of the sexes in society (I can refer you to many scholarly and credible articles and many Quranic verses that talk about this active separation). I absolutely do NOT agree with that, as it effectively places the blame on the woman for being the cause of societal problems due to sex and sexual attraction.
Other than that, I'm not sure how to respond to you because I don't understand a lot of your points. Moral decadence in a society can be ONE factor that leads to problems (depopulation, political apathy etc.) however there's a difference between "moral decadence" and meaningful societal development in regards to human and women's rights. There are other ways to address these problems without telling a woman her body is shameful and the root of all evil. Just because I think wearing a hijaab is a manifestation of the historical belittlement and oppression of women also doesn't mean I'm automatically supporting public nudity. I'm actually a personal believer in modesty and discretion but not when it's directly tied to an obvious and well documented systematic oppression of the female sex.